Methods are known for preparing coloured, tablet cosmetic products, either in the form of powder or poured.
In general, there are two systems to prepare a multicoloured powder cosmetic in the same container, also named godet.
One consists of dosing the single coloured powders into respective cavities laterally adjacent to a metal cylinder equipped with separating partitions. The powders are poured in dosed amounts by means of screws into said cavities and pressed in the cavities themselves by means of respective metal pressing devices exactly shaped as the cavities containing them. Respective pellets are thus obtained which are kept separate from one another by the separating partitions. The tablets are then ejected from the respective cavities and adjacently inserted into a cup, where they are jointed by final pressing by using a compacting mould. A relief or positive-reverse engraving or the like may also be press-imprinted on the product surface.
The number of cavities may vary from two up to more than five, therefore cosmetic products may also be obtained with more than five tablets of different colours and shapes assembled inside the cup itself.
However, such a process is very complex and costly because the metal cylinder in which the partitions are arranged is difficult to be implemented, and extremely fragile because, as a rule, the thickness of the partitions may not exceed 1 mm.
The powder dosing system is also difficult due to the high precision required by the dosages which sometimes are up to 0.5 g and a minimal adhesion of the product to the screws creates an excessive variation in the dosage itself.
The aspect of the compacted product is also little satisfying due to the colour overflows which invade the various sectors.
For this reason, the system currently most used for producing cosmetic products with multicoloured tablets in the same cup is that including pre-forming the single tablets inside the single pre-compacting moulds, ejecting the tablets from the pre-compacting moulds, assembling them in the cup by means of a vacuum transport system, and finally compacting by means of a pressing device. The pressing surface may be machined so as to provide the compacted product with relief, volume and other effects.
This method, which may be used to obtain from two to more than ten tablets in the same cup, is particularly laborious, complex and costly because a single pre-compacting mould is to be made for each tablet, and a pre-compacting and assembling production operation in the cup corresponds to each tablet, without considering that machining the cup results in very precise limits and size restrictions, such as the impossibility to make angles under 20°, acute radiuses below 0.5 mm and more.
Moreover, one of the most negative aspects of such a system consists in that the assembly of the tablets should be performed while leaving a certain air gap between the various tablets, and this to permit an easy descent thereof into the cup. If the gap is excessive, however, the lines may be irregular, while if such a space is reduced, the tablets could rub against one another during the descending step and then create colour invasions or coloured overflows between one tablet and the other.
If the formulas of the single tablets are different from one another, it is highly easy for the two joined surfaces to have a particularly unappealing step in the final compacting step due to the bonding of two or more products the density, consistency and formulating features of which are sometimes very different.
This almost applies to the poured products, for which the technology, which may currently allow tablet poured products to be made in the same container, provides pouring different products by means of fusers within respective spaces of a cup or a final container which are defined by one or more separating bodies, insertable and removable, and variously shaped. The poured products are allowed to cool until solidification, then the separator is extracted and repositioned to permit the pouring and solidifying operation to be repeated up to the last space available.
The separators inserted inside the container to define the spaces of the single tablets and give them the shape wanted are generally made of metal, but they may also be made of plastic or other material. The fundamental requirement of the separators is that they allow the product to be detached from their walls without problems after solidification.
Thereby, poured products may be obtained in the same cup or container, consisting of a certain number of colours and shapes, normally from a minimum of two to a maximum of five and more, perfectly joined with one another.
The most encountered problems by using such a technique are substantially related to the high production costs of the separators, which use particularly elaborate and costly production techniques, as well as the appearance results of the final product which, in addition to always and only being flat, without any relief or volume, is not always uniform between the various parts and often has level differences between one tablet and the other.